Here is the story of one of his merciful acts. A convict woman one day picked up in the street a small parcel. Taking it to a retired place she opened it and found it to contain a watch, a ring, and some money. At once she sought to restore it. But she was a mere convict, and she had committed the unpardonable offence of opening a parcel found in the street. The articles, it appeared, had been stolen, and the thief in fright had dropped the parcel in the street. The woman was tried by a jury of military men, who promptly sentenced her to death. She appealed to Governor Philip, who replied, “If you tell me the truth I will pardon you.” In anguish the condemned woman cried, “As God is my witness I have told you the truth.” To which the representative of Britain answered, “You shall stand before your God before the clock strikes nine to-morrow.” And as Governor Philip drank his coffee at breakfast time on the next day, he had the joy of seeing the woman drop, strangled, from the cross-beam of the gallows.
Botany Bay!—gate of a new continent and ante-room of hell—your memories are at once bright and bloody. The nightmare and the stains have disappeared; the brightness remains. No more shall you witness the inhumanities of the past; the day of liberty and of justice has come. And when Australia has become one of the great nations of the world you will not be forgotten, for you first, on this soil, gave hospitality to Captain Cook.
CHAPTER VIII
BRISBANE, THE QUEEN CITY OF THE NORTH
From Victoria to Queensland is an ascent in many ways. To begin with, it means a railway journey of nearly thirteen hundred miles from south to north. Each mile brings one nearer the tropics. Each hour the heat grows more intense; each day the sky bluer and brighter. I travelled from Sydney by steamer and made the ascent by sea. Even then there was the experience of expansion; of greater warmth, and the first faint perfume of the Lotus land. I returned by railway, and thus completed the circuit.
The approach to Brisbane by sea creates a curious impression upon the Englishman who sees Queensland for the first time. The city unveils itself as an entirely foreign city. In the disposition of its houses, as well as in their style, there is something quite new. The roofs present a curious appearance. Their colour is drab, or grey, or white, the very colours which intensify the blinding light of a tropical climate. Tall palms raise their graceful heads to the sky. Strange plants and flowers and shrubs begin to appear. Conspicuous above everything else is the brilliant and majestic jackaranda tree. Imagine a young English elm tree, of ten years’ growth, without a leaf upon its branches, but entirely covered, in place of leaf, with large thick blue flowers—that is the jackaranda. It is a tree of amazing beauty—a quaint flower, elevated to the dimensions of a tree. And with the spectacle of palm, jackaranda, camphor-tree, and banana, there also greets one a blend of subtle perfumes and spices. When the breeze springs up, one dominating, overpowering scent is borne upon its wings, and brain and mind are oppressed with its heaviness.
This approach to Brisbane by water is very beautiful and impressive. The steamer proceeds up a long and winding river decked on both sides with picturesque gardens and houses, and having for an ultimate background a line of dark, solemn-looking hills. The “city of villas” Brisbane undoubtedly is. One would hardly be surprised to behold at the wharf a population of coloured people. The foreign-looking houses, the tropical surroundings, the warm, voluptuous atmosphere, and this breath of spicy perfumes, together suggest the dreamy East. And one day there will be a population of coloured people in Brisbane, despite the fact that they will be British. For the sun, which respects the skin of none, is slowly bronzing the faces of the inhabitants. “A white Australia!” There can never be a pure white Northern Australia while residence continues and the sun retains its heat. The whitest man must, in course of time, become dark. Why complain of degrees of darkness; for what is black but bronze and duskiness brought to perfection?
The houses of Brisbane have one striking peculiarity—they are built upon wooden piles, the highest of which stand perhaps five or six feet from the ground. The general effect is, to say the least, odd. It is Venice, without the lagoons. And the reason for this peculiarity is the presence of that terrible enemy, the white ant. The base of the piles is immersed in tar, while the crown is capped with a kind of inverted tin plate—a child’s dinner-plate. And the piles themselves are often poisoned. Every precaution has to be taken against the ravages of the white ant. The tar discourages it at the base, the poisoned wood discourages it on the ascent, and the inverted plates foil it at the top. Within the houses similar precautions are taken. The legs of the tables are planted in double earthenware pots, so that the invader may be repulsed. For woe betide the householder who suffers a successful invasion of the white ant! The dreadful enemy is never seen; he works entirely in the dark. His presence is never suspected until the unhappy moment when the once solid piece of furniture suddenly collapses, a total wreck—silently but surely gnawed by the teeth of the concealed foe. Amazing stories are told of the devastation wrought by the white ant. Men out in the country have placed strong boxes in a secure place—secure, as they thought, and then, one day, presuming upon their supposed strength, they have essayed to use the boxes as seats, only to discover themselves suddenly precipitated to the ground, and mixed with the debris of the collapsed trunk. In a church in Brisbane one of the elders, when treading the aisles one day, thought he detected a slight softness in the floor under his feet. Pursuing his inquiries, he discovered, to his dismay, that the white ants had managed to gnaw their way into the floor, despite the fact that a mass of concrete lay between it and the ground below. But there was one fatal flaw, and through a tiny hole the invaders had poured in and commenced their work of undermining. Listening, the elder could hear the chisels of this terrible army of workmen, surely chipping away the wood of the floor. At one house I visited a wooden pile was shown me, nearly eaten through by these creatures. By mere accident the trouble was discovered, and the pile removed. The ordinary householder is not always competent to track the white ant. There may be nothing wrong to his vision, yet all the while the secret work of destruction may be proceeding apace. Hence experts make periodical visits to houses, and discover in time any mischief that may be brewing.
Brisbane is, to all intents and purposes, a smokeless city. The new factory chimneys, of course, contribute smoke to the fair atmosphere, but so far as the private houses are concerned, few wreaths of smoke ascend, for the reason that few fires are burned. In many houses there are no fireplaces at all, save in the kitchen, and there the gas-stove is generally in operation. This absence of smoke is a veritable pleasure. In this particular Brisbane resembles Florence. It is a suggestion also. Not every climate is so warm as this, but in colder climes, where artificial heating is necessary, the smoke nuisance might well be reduced by the use, as here, of gas and electricity.
Brisbane claims to be the most picturesque city in the Commonwealth, and with reason. Its natural situation is not so fine as that of Sydney. It has no harbour comparable with Sydney Harbour. But the city itself is more eastern, more tropical than the southern cities. Its death-rate is the lowest in all the Commonwealth, and that speaks volumes for the climate. The weather is nearly always bright. The winter is one prolonged delight. It equals Hastings, say, in May or June. The spoiled children of Southern Australia who find their winter “cold” come up north and spend the “chilly” months in sunny Queensland. The climate is much warmer than that of Victoria, and it is much more equable. In Brisbane they know nothing of those startling changes in temperature to which men are accustomed in Melbourne. A Brisbane man shudders when we tell him that in Melbourne the thermometer sometimes drops forty degrees in half an hour. But if Brisbane heat is greater than the heat in Victoria, it is tempered by a delicious breeze which springs up every morning with the utmost regularity about eleven o’clock.